So, what’s the word for “twenty three” in Arabic?

The Bing Translator answer:

The Google Translate answer:

?!?

I asked for driving directions between China and Taiwan, so here’s what I get.

Google:

Seriously? Swim across the Pacific Ocean? Good luck with that.

Now, let’s try that on Bing.

Hope your car insurance has water coverage if you depend on Google Maps.

Toyota has announced Toyota Entune, its upcoming in-vehicle navigation (GPS), entertainment and information experience. Entune will be made available on select models in 2011.

Entune offers advanced voice recognition, integrated mobile apps and can be upgraded.  Available on select models later this year,  Bing for Mobile will ship as a featured app of Entune, giving drivers access to over 16 million points of interest (PoI).

You can pair a phone with Entune via Bluetooth and you can access Bing via the in-car dashboard or simply speaking instructions out loud. You easily can search for destinations, points of interest eg. a restaurant or fuel station.

I think this is great progress with Bing. Bing is steadily grabbing search engine share, with Google admitting Bing as their biggest threat. Very recently, Windows Phone 7 was released, which featured a hardware “search” button on every device that would bring up Bing as the search engine on the cellphone.

Binary Tree, the world’s leading provider of cross-platform messaging migration and coexistence solutions, announced today that it is dropping its business partnership with Google. This means the suspension of all sales and marketing efforts for its CMT for Google Apps email migration product, and the exodus from the Google Enterprise Partner Program. Binary Tree will redirect resources to focus completely on transitioning customers to Microsoft’s on-premises and cloud based solutions for Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint.

Said Henry Bestritsky, Co-CEO of Binary Tree:

• "It’s simply a matter of customer demand. The tremendous uptake we are seeing in the market for migrating to the Microsoft messaging and collaboration platform cannot be ignored. And that includes moving to the cloud-based versions of these solutions like Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). The customers we’ve talked to about moving to the cloud, regardless of their size, have told us that they don’t want to move to an e-mail system that offers less functionality and decreases their end user’s overall experience. They are used to a full-featured user experience for e-mail, calendaring and collaboration, and won’t compromise their user’s productivity to save a few bucks. Our goal is to focus our people, processes and technology on helping our clients and partners to transition to the optimal environment for their business value, and hands-down we feel that is the Microsoft platform.”

Stefan af Bjur, General Manager, Binary Tree Europe

• "the companies we have spoken to in Europe have specific requirements for privacy and security that haven’t been met by Google’s hosted solutions. This is especially true of the multi-nationals with offices in Europe who have told me that they need these issues to be addressed and would also like to see a realistic roadmap from Google before even considering their cloud. To date, Microsoft continues to be the preferred choice for cloud services from these types of companies, as shown by the recent decision of a global provider in transport and energy infrastructure based in France."

Companies like Coca-Cola Enterprises, Gerber, Ingersoll Rand, JPMorgan Chase, and many more have chosen Binary Tree’s suite of products to help them make the move to Microsoft.

Matt Cain, vice president and lead e-mail analyst at Gartner, recently published the Gartner MarketScope for E-mail Systems, 2010 (Matt Cain, Gartner Research, Aug. 12, 2010), which evaluated the major e-mail vendors. Microsoft received a “strong positive” rating, and has purchased the reprint rights. To read the report, please click here: Gartner MarketScope for E-mail Systems, 2010.

The MarketScope included vendors such as Google, IBM, MiraPoint, Novell, Open X-change, VMware/Zimbra and Xandros/Scalix. It’s interesting to note that Microsoft is the only vendor that received a “strong positive” rating.

Interesting observation by Mary Jo Foley of the ZDNet “All about Microsoft” blog.

I quote:

On June 3, however, Google did something that really surprised me. The company that’s made its reputation on home-page minimalism announced it was going to start allowing users to change the Google.com background by adding their own customized photos from their PCs and/or Picasa. Google will begin phasing in the new customization option in the U.S. first, and extend it internationally in the coming days, officials said.

Bing, which turned one-year-old today, has been offering users different Microsoft-selected photo backgrounds each day. The Bing background photo also includes a number of hotlinks inside the photo, allowing users to obtain more information via Bing on the subject of each day’s photo selection.

Can you see the headlines if MIcrosoft had decided to modify the Bing home page and make it more like Google’s (and like the original WIndows Live Search)? “Microsoft copies Google!” “Get out your photocopiers (again) Redmond!” The reaction to Google’s announcement has been quite subdued in comparison….

I too wonder why this never made the headlines. If it were Microsoft using anything remotely similar to Google on the Bing website, it would have made high waves on the blogosphere.

Google has said sorry again to the public after inadvertently collecting 600 GB of personal wireless data on people’s unencrypted wireless networks, which may even include personal emails.

Last Friday, Google revealed that its Street View cars were collecting sensitive personal information from wireless networks in addition to taking pictures of the world’s roadways. Today Google announced that they are going to stop collecting Wi-Fi information altogether.

Interesting to note that this adds to the long string of privacy issues surrounding Google:

• Google has already been collecting publicly broadcast SSID information (Wi-Fi network names) and MAC addresses
• Google Chrome allows Google to know to each and every URL or even partial URL as you type it in the location bar, by the keystroke. It keeps sending this information back to Google without asking you, this means they know what you’re looking at with their browser!
• In its 2007 Consultation Report, Privacy International ranked Google as “Hostile to Privacy”, its lowest rating on their report, making Google the only company in the list to receive that ranking. Read the report.
• Google’s Gmail is the only email provider that reviews the contents of users’ mail and uses it  to improve relevance of advertisements.
• The launch of Google Buzz, Google’s social networking service resulted in anyone with a Gmail account being automatically added as a contact to pre-existing Gmail contacts. Google Buzz immediately drew criticism for violating user privacy because it automatically allowed Gmail users’ contacts to view their other contacts.
• Google’s online map service, Street View, has been accused of taking pictures of people’s private homes and taking pictures of people who walk down the street without their permission, not knowing they are being watched on Google’s online service.
• Google saves your internet searches for 2 years on their systems.

NSS Labs has published three independent studies on web browser protection against socially-engineered malware. The tests were performed during first quarter of 2009, 3rd quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010.

In all three tests, Internet Explorer 8 was the only browser that improved its block rate test-over-test, successfully stopping 69%, 81%, and 85%. This shows Microsoft’s continuous commitment to strengthen security of our browsing platform against emerging threats.

As per this independent report, as of today (Q1 2010), Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer 8 is most secure browser that can protect you against socially engineered malware.

Did Adsense just blacklist you and deny your payment for no wrongdoing on your part – just because they “think” your account poses a risk to their advertisers? Worry not, there are other decent publisher/advertiser networks, two of which I am using on this blog.

I’ve been doing some research and here are two alternatives to Google Adsense:

1. Clicksor

Clicksor offers webmasters the opportunity to earn more income by simply underlining a selection of clickable text (inline text links) or displaying targeted contextual ads (various sizes of banners) on their websites or blogs. Minimum Payout is $50 and you can receive your payments every 15 days. To register or learn more, click here or the banner below.

2. Bidvertiser

Bidvertiser offers site-targeted pay-per-click text ads and image ads. Bidvertiser provide site-targeted placement by asking both advertisers and website publishers to specify categories for their ads and websites. The action is to make sure an advertisement only appear in relevant websites instead of any website that have the same keywords as the ads. Bidvertiser is available for ebay sellers, and has minimum payout of $10 on Paypal and $50 in checks. Bidvertiser makes advertisers bid for space automatically and allows you to sell your ad space automatically to the highest bidder. To register or learn more, click here or the banner below.

Good luck monetizing your website/blog!